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Key benefits

Identify key issues that affect vSphere storage visibility, performance, and capacity

Comprehend the storage metrics and statistics that are collected in vSphere

Get acquainted with the many vSphere features that can proactively protect your environment

Description

Virtualization has created a new role within IT departments everywhere; the vSphere administrator. vSphere administrators have long been managing more than just the hypervisor, they have quickly had to adapt to become a ‚Äòjack of all trades' in organizations. More and more tier 1 workloads are being virtualized, making the infrastructure underneath them all that more important. Due to this, along with the holistic nature of vSphere, administrators are forced to have the know-how on what to do when problems occur.This practical, easy-to-understand guide will give the vSphere administrator the knowledge and skill set they need in order to identify, troubleshoot, and solve issues that relate to storage visibility, storage performance, and storage capacity in a vSphere environment.This book will first give you the fundamental background knowledge of storage and virtualization. From there, you will explore the tools and techniques that you can use to troubleshoot common storage issues in today's data centers. You will learn the steps to take when storage seems slow, or there is limited availability of storage. The book will go over the most common storage transport such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS, and explain what to do when you can't see your storage, where to look when your storage is experiencing performance issues, and how to react when you reach capacity. You will also learn about the tools that ESXi contains to help you with this, and how to identify key issues within the many vSphere logfiles.

Who is this book for?

If you are a vSphere administrator, this is the book for you. This book will provide you with 'need to know' information about the various storage transports that ESXi utilizes, the tools and techniques we can use to identify problems, and the fundamental knowledge and steps to take to troubleshoot storage-related issues. Prior knowledge of the VMWare environment is assumed.

What you will learn

Identify the root cause of storage issues within vSphere

Understand where to look when storage is suddenly not available

Use esxtop to monitor and discover pain points in your infrastructure

Diagnose and resolve SCSI reservations and queuing issues

Design storage properly based on workloads

Monitor and alert on your thinly provisioned disks and data store capacity

Utilize Storage DRS to proactively balance your capacity and workload on your data stores

Maintain compliance in terms of placement with Profile Driven Storage

Grant VMs the performance they need with Storage I/O Control

Decipher storage-related error entries in the vSphere logfiles

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

Subscribe now

View plans & pricing

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Marco C. Oct 13, 2014

The definitive guide to understand vSphere storage management and troubleshooting. Very useful the ending section about problem investigation and solution. A must read.

Amazon Verified review

Tim Antonowicz Dec 28, 2013

In my 10+ years of managing and designing vSphere environments, I have come across a few books that should be on the desks of every vSphere Administrator. You should not be caught without a copy of Mastering VMware vSphere by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, VMware vSphere Design by Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie, and vSphere Clustering Deepdive by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. Mike Preston's Troubleshooting vSphere Storage could easily be added to the list. While the book is only 5 chapters long, it is organized in a logical fashion that not only allows for easy reading, but quick bookmarking. The first chapter gives an overview of how storage is organized within virtual environments. It lays out the framework of storage organization within vSphere and how it relates to the physical world of servers, networks, and shared storage. Some basic information is introduced for the novice, followed by more detailed explanations of how the pieces interact. The usual 'alphabet soup' of acronyms doesn't detract from the layout and keeps the reader on track. With this foundation in place, it allows for the other chapters to flow in an organized fashion. The following chapters outline which tools to use to analyze your storage, where to look for problems and how to identify them. Common problems such as contention, capacity, and overcommitment are identified for the reader and several tips are given to show not only what these problems will look like in your environment but also how to identify and resolve them. The three appendices are the 'Crown Jewels' of the book. Appendix A contains a list of your most common storage troubleshooting steps, followed by the commands and procedures you will need to take in order to eliminate each one. Knowing which questions to ask are good, but having the commands at your fingertips when you need them can be invaluable when problems arise. Preston has saved your bacon with this section. Appendix B lists out all of the ESXTOP commands and functions, which ones you will need for various issues, and how to use them. This will save time and frustration for those SysAdmins that don't frequently use the tool. And finally, Appendix C lists out all of you iSCSI error codes. This is something that most of us will seldom need for day-to day administration. However, that one or two times when you are scratching your head trying to navigate out of a difficult situation, it can save critical time. Troubleshooting vSphere Storage is a great reference for any vSphere SysAdmin. Not only does it outline an excellent troubleshooting methodology for your environment, but also lays down a strong background for readers to understand just why storage is important for a healthy vSphere design. I would recommend this book to anybody that manages vSphere as well as Storage admins that need to support vSphere.Tim AntonowiczPrincipal ArchitectVCDX 112@timantz

Amazon Verified review

SLJ Johnson Oct 24, 2014

A short but concise read on many many trouble shooting tips and tricks for getting your storage working with Vsphere. Some of it you'll already know, but plenty of value in the stuff you don't. Worth the effort in my opinion.

Amazon Verified review

Josh Atwell Jan 29, 2014

As a virtualization administrator for various organizations my biggest skills gap was in troubleshooting storage issues in my environments. Most of the time you're limited to VMware KBs (which are great), blog posts, or trying to work through various help files. What we have always lacked was a comprehensive resource that can provide a strategy, an outline of tools, and an easy reference. Recently I got the opportunity to read this book and in fact used it to repair to issues in my lab.I particularly like the appendices that provide Troubleshooting steps, a breakdown of statistics for esxtop, and iSCSI error codes. The chapters themselves also provide a well structured gathering of valuable information. Mike puts together chapters on1. storage concepts2. Tools used for troubleshooting and managing storage in vSphere3. Troubleshooting storage visibility4. Troubleshooting storage contention5. Troubleshooting capacity and overcommitEach chapter provides a wealth of information and often procedures for configuring storage in vSphere environments.I particularly enjoyed the Tip sections located throughout the chapters. These breakout segments provide a side conversation to the topic at hand. Often these Tip sections would address questions you may have while you're consuming the chapter.All in all I give this book two thumbs up and a three sighs of relief. I'm sure any VMware administrator who picks it up will gain some valuable tidbits, as well as an excellent consolidated reference document for troubleshooting and understanding storage in their environment.

Amazon Verified review

Andras Herceg Dec 30, 2013

Storage is one of the most important key area in the virtualization, so it is essential and significant to know how it connected to another areas, understand how it works, how can you troubleshoot storage related availability, performance, space, other issues. The author Mike Preston did a great job with his book "Troubleshooting vSphere Storage".The five main chapters covers the most important areas. In the 1st section describes the storage technologies, file systems, PSA, PSP, SATP: the base knowledge. The 2nd chapter has the tools which can be used during an issue investigation: esxtop, charts, reports, maps, logs, views. 3rd chapter writes about LUN masking, numbering, resignaturing, FC/iSCSI/NFS visibility, permissions, authentication, storage related esxcli commands. The 4th chapter covers the contention and performance issues: DAVG/KAVG/GAVG latency (and thresholds), IOPS+RAID (how to design), OS/HBA/LUN queues. The last 5th chapter is about the capacity, and overcommitment: think/thick VMDKs, thin provisioning on SAN (LUN) level, snapshots, swap, monitoring VMFS usage, sDRS.There are three more appendices, which are really useful toolkit for analyzing storage issues: troubleshoot steps, esxtop in-depth, and interpreting iSCSI error codes.The book is not a long one, has only 150 pages. easy-to-understand, logical, has many screenshots, diagrams, charts for illustrating.One problem: the book is a bit short, it could have been longer. There are several topics which would deserve more. And a second: When I was preparing to my VCAP5-DCA exam, the book was not yet exists, it would have helped to me a lot at that time. Anyway I used some other books, such as I would also recommend to check out the "VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive" by Duncan Epping and Frank DennemanI would recommend this book to especially vSphere admins, but it can useful for vSphere architects as well. If you are managing vSphere infrastructure for a while, and you want to dig a little deeper in storage area, it is a must read book for you.

Amazon Verified review

Troubleshooting vSphere Storage: All vSphere administrators will benefit big-time from this book because it gives you clear, practical instructions on troubleshooting a whole host of storage problems. From fundamental to advanced techniques, it's all here.

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